Ratings Key

★★★★ = Excellent. The best the genre has to offer.★★★1/2 = Very Good. Perhaps not "perfect," but undoubtedly a must-see.★★★ = Good. Accomplishes what it sets out to do and does it well.★★1/2 = Fair. Clearly flawed and nothing spectacular, but competently made. OK entertainment.★★ = Mediocre. Either highly uneven or by-the-numbers and uninspired.★1/2 = Bad. Very little to recommend.★ = Very Bad. An absolute chore to sit through.NO STARS! = Abysmal. Unwatchable dreck that isn't even bad-movie amusing.SBIG = So Bad It's Good. Technically awful movies with massive entertainment value.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973)

... aka: Godmonster, The
... aka: Secret of Silverdale, The

Directed by:Fredric Hobbs

Well now here's something a little
different. Naive small town sheep rancher Eduardo "Eddie" Etchavaria (Richard
Marion) arrives in "The biggest little city in the world;" Reno,
Nevada, wins a few hundred bucks on a slot machine and decides to
accompany a few people (including Erica "Vixen" Gavin) to
the small town of Virginia City for a party. He gets in a minor scuffle at
a bar after a hooker steals his money and ends up broke and in a jeep with
Dr. Cyrus Clemens (E. Kerrigan Prescott), head of a local
university's anthropology department, who drops Eddie off on a farm so he
can spend the night in a pen full of sheep. The following day when Dr.
Clemens and his research assistant Mariposa DeQuill (Karen Ingenthron)
show up to check in on him they find Eddie in a state of shock and a
bizarre, bloody half-formed sheep's embryo lying next to him. Clemens
grabs his tape recorder and notes, "I think we all stumbled onto an
amazing event, almost incredible from a scientific standpoint" and adds
their findings are "possibly the result of chromosomic breakdown and cross
fertilization." They transfer both the embryo and Eddie to their private
test laboratory at Indian Flats for observation.

Meanwhile, Virginia City Mayor Charles Silverdale (Stuart Lancaster),
who helped revive the historic Comstock area and restored it to resemble an
1800s Wild West town, runs the local "601" secret society. Christopher
Barnstable (Christopher Brooks), working for a billionaire in the
tool and mining industry trades, shows up wanting to buy up all the mine
leases in the country, and the locals bound together to stop him. The
Mayor's right hand man, Phillip Maldove (Steven Kent Browne),
whorehouse madam and fake medium Madame Alta (Peggy Browne) and the
local authorities, led by the slovenly Sheriff Gordon (Robert
Hirschfeld), all get to work on trying to drive the corporate invader
out of their town. They set him up to make him think he shot the sheriff's
dog and then hold a mock church funeral (!) for it ("He was only a dog,
but he filled us with joy and gayety until a bullet struck him down.")
When that doesn't work, Phillip invites him over to his home, cracks a
bottle over his head and shoots himself so that Christopher's thrown in
the slammer and charged with attempted murder.

Back at the lab, Dr. Clemens, Mariposa and Eddie all tend to the embryo,
which has rapidly grown into a large-sized monster that they keep docile
with steady injections of tranquilizer. Yes folks, it's a giant, mutant,
bipedal sheep monster. While most viewers will look upon it as a laughable
creation, it's definitely different (it walks on its hind legs) and even
somewhat abstract (one arm is a lot longer than the other). Two things it
is decidedly not are scary or threatening. Opting for martial law to cover
their tracks, Mayor Silverdale and his cronies drag Christopher out into
the desert to hang him, but he's rescued by Madame Alta, who's recently
taken a liking to him. They end up at the lab, a shoot-out ensues and the
creature kills a guy and escapes into the desert. When Dr. Clemens (who
wants the monster kept alive) theorizes about the creature's smarts, the
Mayor, who wants the creature captured and put in their museum, tells him,
"This is ridiculous. I can't accept this concept of intelligence. I say
it's a damaged mongoloid beast!" The pitiful, slow, awkward creature
doesn't get to do much aside from scaring children having a picnic and
blowing up a gas station, before a bunch of cowboys lasso it. Things ends
with a small scale revolutionary ending and some out-of-left-field
profundity.

This one's gone down as a minor footnote in film history books as an
obscure, insignificant, inept monster movie, and in many ways it is,
though there are clearly ecological and sociopolitical objectives at play
in here. I'm not saying these aspects are necessarily well-executed (for
the most part they're not), but they still make this somewhat more
interesting than other cheapie monster / schlock flicks of the day. It's
quirky, sometimes amusing and the western town setting gives it a fun and
unique backdrop. Prior to making this, Hobbs (a military vet, graduate of
Cornell and renowned artist, teacher and writer) was on the fast track to
art film success with the well-received surrealist comedy Troika
(1969). Godmonster, which was filmed on a budget of 135,000 dollars
and only booked a couple of showings upon completion before being shelved
for decades, completely derailed his further film plans after a promising
start.

It went unseen for years until Something Weird unearthed it for a DVD
release. Extras on the set include the nudie horror PASSION IN THE SUN (1964; aka The Girl and the Geek) and a truncated 'soft' edit of
the awful Bigfoot porno the THE GEEK (1971). Hobbs' other genre offering -
Alabama's Ghost (also 1973) - had already long been available on
VHS on the ThrillerVideo label in the 1980s (with Elvira commentary) but
now it's the more difficult of the two to track down.

Hidden Horror

I contributed an essay on George A. Romero's 'Season of the Witch' (1972) to this wonderful book celebrating overlooked or underrated horror films. Forward by William "Maniac" Lustig and endorsed by Robert "Freddy Krueger" Englund. Click on the photo to be redirected to Amazon where you can learn more or purchase a copy.

THE ORLOKS - 2015

(Results from the IMDb user polls. More will be added weekly throughout the year.)